López Obrador Affirms, Mexico Will Not Join the BRICS

Aug. 9, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—In response to a question from Sputnik Mundo at his Aug. 8 morning press conference, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) (in Spanish) was explicit about what he had broadly hinted all along: Mexico will not apply for membership in the BRICS, preferring to strengthen its free trade agreement with the U.S. and Canada.

“We aren’t going to participate in that bloc, in that association. We praise other countries for doing so, but for reasons related to economics, our neighbors, geopolitics, we will continue strengthening our alliance with North America and all of America.”

To this straightforward admission that he is not prepared to buck the U.S. at this time, AMLO added a healthy dose of wishful thinking and delusions about economics and the strategic situation.

“Our proposal is to strengthen the [free trade] treaty with the United States and Canada, to consolidate them as a region, strengthen ourselves, help each other, complement each other, share investment, technology, labor force, the capabilities of the workers of the three countries, improve salaries, and consolidate North America. That comes first.”

He said that Mexico’s proposal is that “this integration has to happen in all of the Americas, to achieve something similar to the European Union.” Such an integrated America, he claimed, would be

“the most important region in the world.... We’re talking about the greatest volume of trade in goods, of imports and exports, leaving our Canadian friends, with whom we have very good relations, in second place. I don’t want to brag, but in recent years we have had higher growth rates than the United States.”

He went on to praise President Biden for not building a single meter of a wall between the two countries, unlike his predecessor.